


slide on through my window

by firebreathing_bitchqueen



Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:16:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27155803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firebreathing_bitchqueen/pseuds/firebreathing_bitchqueen
Summary: Leila leaves a window open.
Relationships: Female Detective/Morgan (The Wayhaven Chronicles)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24





	slide on through my window

**Author's Note:**

> For best results, read while listening to "Want You In My Room," by Carly Rae Jepsen, followed by the _Into the Woods_ soundtrack (original Broadway recording, obviously).

“Planning on leaving this open all night, sweetheart?”

Leila yelped and whirled in the hallway outside her bedroom, a hand flying to her chest. “Oh my _god_ , Morgan, what the hell?”

Morgan shrugged and stepped forward to linger in the doorway, resting a shoulder against the white frame. “You left your window open.”

“You almost gave me a heart attack.”

“I already knew I had a talent for that, sweetheart. Figured you’d be used to the spiked pulse by now.”

“I was getting ready for bed.” Leila protested, but stepped closer to the other woman, reaching out to hook a finger in Morgan’s belt loops, tugging her closer and tilting her head up expectantly.

“So I can see,” Morgan quirked a brow, her eyes roving over Leila’s body before she leaned down obligingly for a teasingly brief kiss, pulling her lips just far enough from Leila’s to murmur into her mouth. “Nice outfit.”

“I was getting ready for _bed_ ,” Leila repeated, tilting her chin up in an attempt to bridge the gap between them. “It typically involves pajamas.”

Morgan pulled back, smirking, but kept her hands where they’d landed on Leila’s hips. Although the thin poplin material of the over-sized button down she slept in provided a very poor buffer against the warmth of Morgan’s hands, Leila nonetheless felt that it was, in the current circumstances, still much too substantial a barrier between them.

“If you’d come a little earlier, you might have caught me in my robe,” Leila quipped, tilting her head with a similarly lopsided grin. 

“I’m sure there will be other opportunities,” Morgan’s mouth quirked upwards briefly, lazily, at the edges before she lowered her face to Leila’s once again.

Leila had never done drugs — she rarely even drank, when it came down to it, having rather lost the taste for it after a few disastrous, weeping landmark nights in college — but there were a few experiences in her life where she felt that she could almost understand why people did, where she imagined she felt some of the appeal of them. (The downers, anyway: she wasn’t sure she’d ever get the appeal of something like cocaine. Who needed to move that fast?) What she’d heard of people who tried to make homes out of opiates, though, or narcotic substances — she was a cop, after all, and in this climate, with scores of people falling victim to the opioid epidemic like they were, she’d been curious enough that she’d had to see what all the fuss was about. Not firsthand, obviously, but god knew she saw enough articles and pamphlets about it nowadays, the countless seminars and professional development workshops and “retreats” that went to exotic locales like the conference room, all cheerfully presenting glossy new acronyms for assisting citizens presumed to be under the influence. Not that there was a significant presence of addicts in Wayhaven. Well, she corrected herself, at least not of the kind presented in the pamphlets. Wayhaven had its underbelly, same as anywhere.

Still, hyperbolic as the seminars and concomitant propaganda were, they all seemed to more or less agree on the appeal of that particular flavor of escapism. Like you were walking into a deep, quiet wood, going deeper and deeper, not sure how or if you’d emerge again or if you even cared to retrace your steps at all. The dizzy, sound-dampening, wool-wrapped cocoon of contented fugue that heightened and diminished sensation simultaneously. She felt it when she painted for hours at a time, not feeling the fatigue in her eyes or arms or hands over the hours lost to the wide, careful sweep of brush on canvas. She felt it when she woke early, the grey predawn hours where it seemed she might be the only person in all the world who wasn’t still tucked away in dreamy slumber, as if she might have an entire day to herself before the world’s had really begun.

When she first moved into her apartment, she’d felt it on her first full day alone in the place, too. She’d taken the entire weekend off from her duties as an officer, and felt for the first time in a long time, that she had nowhere she needed to be, no one with whom she needed to check in, nothing she needed to do except settle into her new space. She was accountable to no one but herself and her apartment, which, in turn, was accountable only to her.

She’d never lived alone before. In college, she’d had roommates, and while she’d spent more time alone than not as a child, her mother’s house had never really been _hers_. Even after college, when she’d moved back to save up and look over the childhood home that her mother inexplicably kept but rarely used, like an ill-fitting or seldom-used article of clothing kept at the back of her wardrobe “just in case” its time should come, when the au pairs of her childhood had long passed its threshold for the last time, Leila always felt the house’s allegiance would forever lie with Rebecca (and, perhaps, with the housekeeper who seemed almost to have been dreamt up in its very walls, springing into fully-formed adulthood on the day Rebecca decided she had need of one).

But that first morning, for the first time, she had been well and truly alone. When she’d woken up that morning, boxes half-unpacked, furniture mostly in the right rooms, sunlight streaming through unshaded windows and bouncing off still-bare walls, Leila had felt that same cottony cocoon wrap itself around her mind, just as the freshly laundered sheets wrapped her sleep-warm skin and the echoes of sun-drenched silence wrapped her new home. Some narcotic synthesized from sunshine and silence.

And she felt it now with Morgan.

And, just as she felt every other time she’d let her brain wander into that dark, preternaturally quiet wood, Leila didn’t feel the least concerned about whether she’d be able to find the path out of it again.

Instead, she just wanted to wander deeper into it.

She tilted her face, angling to brush the tip of her nose along Morgan’s jawline, her neck, under her ear, breathing her in. She’d always found it strange and appealing that Morgan, who probably smoked enough to keep the entire tobacco industry afloat (although less now, Leila hadn’t failed to notice), somehow never seemed to smell of cigarettes. Smoky, perhaps, but in the way of incense: a sensual halo of heady, aromatic warmth, all fig and balsam and vetiver.

It was uncharacteristic, she knew. To wander into the woods, no fear of the dark unknown.

_The woods are just trees. The trees are just woods._ The snippet of song popped into her head unbidden and she smiled to herself, almost laughed, a sharp little exhale through her nose that quickly turned into a sharp little _inhale_ when Morgan’s hands on her hips tightened, slid lower on the outsides of her thighs, fingers dancing first along and then under the hem of her nightshirt.

It was fitting, she knew. To be reminded of Little Red and her foolish cocksuredness as she trekked dutifully, carelessly into the woods

_to Grandmother’s house!_

where she saw no need to fear, cape as red as blood wrapped snugly around her for the journey.

_Into the woods_

_Then out of the woods_

_And home before dark!_

But it was dark now, and Leila, well. She was just entering the woods. She was all too aware, though, what may be lurking on the journey. Still, hadn’t Little Red herself acknowledged scary is exciting?

_(And a little bit not_ )

Uncharacteristic. The relationship that wasn’t a relationship. The woman who’d appeared in her window. Who was nothing to her. Who was everything to her.

_There are always wolves_ …

That narcotic, heady, red-as-blood wool wrapped round her senses, dulling all her sharpest neuroses, covering those prickly spines of attachment that usually snagged at her, that would have been too sharp for Morgan’s sensitive (warm-soft-velvet) skin. Leila wanted to fill more of her senses with Morgan, if she could just figure out how to taste and see her at the same time. Morgan’s hands had slid further up her thighs, the fabric of her nightshirt bunching around her waist as she felt herself lifted, hands gripping her ass, legs wrapping around Morgan as though of their own accord.

“You wanna lose these?” And it takes a moment to even understand the question, she’s so distracted by

(lips pressed to her neck, fingers tugging the waistband of her underwear, dull graze of teeth against the soft swell of her shoulder)

everything, to understand which sensation went with which pronoun, blurted a string of affirmative sounds and almost-words then cursed the incorrigible number of buttons on her nightshirt, then cursed again for different reasons as Morgan’s hands and mouth continued their exploration of Leila’s body. 

_Granny said, The mouth of a wolf’s not the end of the world._

After, Leila still hadn’t lost that dreamy sunshine-and-silence feeling, and let herself build a sort of literal cocoon of duvet and pillow, curling on her side to smile at Morgan. “Will you close the window on your way out?”

Raised brow, shadow of what could have been a frown. Not unhappy. Considering. “Am I on my way out?”

“Aren’t you?” Leila considered propping herself up on an elbow to look at Morgan more fully, then decided against it, nestling her face further into the cool linen of her pillow. She wanted to keep her cocoon. “Got what you came for, right?” She joked.

Uncharacteristic. But so easy to slide into. The woods are just trees. The trees are just woods.

_No need to be afraid there,_ her brain supplied, song snippet still floating around her head.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Morgan gave a wry smile. The creases of almost-frown from a moment ago had vanished. “What’s the rush? There’s hours until we have anywhere else to be. I haven’t nearly gotten everything I came for.”

_(There’s something in the glade there.)_


End file.
